One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read Online Free PDF Page A

her upraised pumping fists Zippi waved a tool of her trade—a double-edged knife in her right hand, a shield to hold back the prepucein her left. She was a mohel , a circumciser, like her namesake Zippora, the reputedly black-skinned wife of Moses Our Teacher, the blood groom too busy having visions and saving the Jewish people to attend to his own sons, forcing her to do the job and sacrifice their boys herself. The third tool of Zippi’s trade were her own plump lips, with which she performed the meziza , sucking the blood from the wound, and with which she now was chanting Te-Tem-Ima along with the swelling congregation packing the entire area in front of the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, snaking around the corner to Yekhezkel Street with no end in sight.
    It had been because of this child Zippi, now a grown woman, not only already a mother in her own right but also a grandmother, that Temima had finally broken with Abba Kadosh and fled his patriarchal kingdom in the Judean Desert, followed out of the wilderness by Shira, another one of his concubines, who had started life as Sherry Silver and now went by the name Kol-Isha-Erva. The former lead singer and instrumentalist of the once-popular band Jephta’s Daughters, which performed for audiences of women only, Shira had been living on a trust fund in the Nakhlaot section of Jerusalem and working part-time as an ecological nature guide when she surrendered to Abba Kadosh, who was madly turned on by her vibrato. Temima now spotted Kol-Isha-Erva easily in the crowd, a thick twisted rope girdling her waist, its trailing length encircling the waists, one behind the other, of the women who were her students in her school for prophetesses, some of them blowing long sustained blasts followed by pulsing beats on upraised shofars, others flinging their arms in the air, their shoulders twitching, ecstatic utterances coming from their lips in an ancient, mystical tongue that no one but fools and children could any longer decipher—the spirit of God had settled upon them so that if anyone wondered what had come over these girls, it could be said of them that they too were among the prophets.
    Kol-Isha-Erva had taken her name around the same time and in the same spirit of defiance and revelation as Temima when she had recast her own name to honor the Woman of Endor. A woman’s voice is nakedness, you say? Well then, that is how I shall be known—Woman’s-Naked-Voice, Kol-Isha-Erva. She tilted back her head to look up to Temima’s window, and even through the veil they knew their eyes linked instantly. The two women were closer in spirit than twin sisters still in the womb in body. Kol-Isha-Erva was to Temima Ba’alatOv as Rav Nosson of Nemirov wasto Rav Nakhman of Bratslav. She was Temima’s scribe and the recorder for posterity of all her stories and wisdom since, like Rav Nakhman, Temima never wrote anything down herself, she regarded writing to be a crime, and as Temima herself used to say, Were it not for the voice of Kol-Isha-Erva, no one would ever hear me and nothing of me would remain.
    As Kol-Isha-Erva and her band of student prophetesses were prodded forward by the surging crowd, she flicked her head sideways in a signal to Temima to look in the direction she was indicating. The aperion borne by her four bodyguards, her Bnei Zeruya, was turning the corner and coming into view, preceded by her white-robed knot of priestesses led by Aish-Zara, Temima’s girlhood friend from Boro Park, Essie Rappaport, in the tall white mitre of the high priestess and with an Urim and Tumim jewel-encrusted breastplate hanging from a heavy chain around her neck that Paltiel had ordered on the Internet from the Yale University website. Taking her halting and excruciating steps leaning on two canes, the pain of her metastasized cancer creeping along her spine through her hips down her legs, fortified by a fierce inner will, Essie had insisted upon